Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Cablevision Remote DVR Case: Good News, For Now

from the at-least-for-a-little-while dept

Well, here's a bit of good news this Monday. It appears that the Supreme Court has listened to the Solicitor General, and refused to hear the appeal concerning Cablevision's remote DVR offering. This is good for a variety of reasons. We've discussed how this is an important case on a variety of levels, but also a tricky one. The appeals court ruling got the right results (saying a remote DVR was legal, and that buffer copies were not infringing) but really had to twist itself into a knot to explain why -- demonstrating just how ridiculous copyright law is these days.

The basic facts are quite straightforward. A DVR, such as a TiVo that sits next to your TV is perfectly legal. Time shifting content has been shown as legal, and not infringing by the courts in the past. That's great. However, Cablevision effectively built a remote DVR. It sat in Cablevision's datacenter, rather than next to your TV. Otherwise, it did exactly the same thing. From a user's perspective, it was almost identical. You could save shows and forward and rewind shows. Functionally identical. Hollywood insisted that by moving where the box lived, it somehow made it illegal, coming up with absolutely ridiculous arguments about how it's like Cablevision setting up a gun for someone to shoot by pushing a button -- ignoring that in the equivalent reality, no one's getting shot, they're just doing something that's already been found to be perfectly legal (time shifting).

That said, this question is hardly over. While the appeals court decision came to the obviously correct conclusion, the fact that it did so in such a roundabout, and at times tortured, way, actually suggests that we'll be seeing this issue come up elsewhere in other courts in some manner. Eventually there's likely to be a split of some sort, and perhaps then the Supreme Court will weigh in. Still, given how screwed up the Supreme Court seems to get when it comes to copyright, delaying that seems like a good thing. It's quite strange that the Supreme Court seems to do such a good job with patent law, but gets totally twisted around when it comes to copyright law. Still, in the meantime, Cablevision can move forward with its remote DVR, and at the least, folks in the Second Circuit can rest assured that buffered copies are not infringing.

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Obama Administration Sides With Technology Over Hollywood In Cablevision Case

from the finally! dept

It's no secret that those of us who have been in favor of pushing back against the worst abuses of intellectual property law have been disappointed by the Obama administration -- which brought in a number of entertainment industry lawyers and seemed to side with IP holders over the public at almost every turn... until now. We've talked about the importance of the lawsuit over Cablevision's remote DVR system, and whether it represented copyright infringement. The appeals court had ruled that just because the DVR was hosted at Cablevision's datacenter instead of in a house it wasn't infringement. This makes perfect sense. Yet the entertainment industry has been claiming that allowing Cablevision to host DVRs on its own premise is infringement and Cablevision has to pay extra for the right to offer the same exact TiVo-type service that anyone can use in their home. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court asked the new Solicitor General to weigh in. At the time, we noted that this could be a good thing, since one of the last things Solicitor General Elena Kagan did before leaving Harvard to join the administration was recruit Larry Lessig to Harvard.

And, indeed, it appears that Kagan has not succumbed to entertainment industry's tortured logic on this issue and has recommended that the Supreme Court not take the case, saying that the appeals court ruling reasonably resolved the issues in the case. Either way, it's nice to see that the administration hasn't been totally taken over by those who believe in twisting copyright law to protect obsolete business models.

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Is Cablevision Caving On Remote DVR?

from the hopefully-not... dept

One of the more important copyright lawsuit decisions was last years appeals court ruling in the Cablevision remote DVR case, which we discussed at length at the time. Cablevision built a remote DVR system. It was almost exactly like a TiVo, except that the device sat in a Cablevision datacenter, rather than next to your television. Functionally, it was no different. It really was just the length of the wire and where the box sat. Now, using a DVR in your home to record TV is perfectly legal. But the TV networks hate that, even though DVRs may actually have helped the TV industry by making it easier for people to watch their favorite shows (no one ever said they were good at figuring out the big picture). So they sued Cablevision, claiming that because the box sat on Cablevision's property, it was no longer legal and now it was copyright infringement.

The networks love to set up absolutely ridiculous explanations like saying that Cablevision is like the person who sets up a gun to go off when a door opens, so it's not the person who opens the door who commits the murder, but the person who set it up. Except... that makes no sense. Murder is illegal. Recording a TV show for personal use is not. A more accurate analogy would be like setting up a pillow to fall on someone when you open the door. That's not illegal for either the person who opened the door, or the person who set it up... because the action (falling pillow/recording a show for personal use) is perfectly legal. But the networks want to ignore this, and tried to twist copyright law by saying that because Cablevision's remote DVR creates a buffer version for a fraction of a second, it's making a copy, and thus violating copyright law. Seriously.

While a district court bought the argument, the appeals court (thankfully) pointed out how ridiculous this interpretation of the law was, and said the device is legal. The networks are now appealing to the Supreme Court, and the court has asked the Obama administration for input. I know there's been massive lobbying from a lot of different parties trying to get the administration up to speed on the detailed issues, and hopefully the important points get across. While this may seem like a trivial issue, it could impact nearly every online service, that suddenly becomes liable for making a "buffer" copy on its own servers based on something you do on your computer. Lots of "cloud" computing services could suddenly face massive copyright liabilities.

Still... while we wait for the Supreme Court to go one way or the other with this, it appears that Cablevision has been negotiating a compromise on the device, which (as Broadband Reports notes) probably means making things a lot worse for consumers (funny how that works). Once again, we'd have a scenario where content companies are killing off innovation because they're unable to adapt themselves -- and that's a really sad outcome. However, it might also lead to an end of the lawsuit, which could leave the appeals court ruling standing (which would be a good thing, rather than risk a Supreme Court overturn).

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Supreme Court Asks Administration For Its Thoughts On Cablevision Remote DVR And Copyright

from the but...-which-administration? dept

There was a tremendously important copyright ruling in August of last year, concerning whether or not it was copyright infringement for Cablevision to run a remote DVR for its subscribers. The whole lawsuit (and the resulting decision) shows just how screwed up copyright law has become, and how every new generation of technologies requires twisting and patching copyright laws to have them make any sense at all (this is a problem, not a feature). In this case, everyone agrees that a DVR in your own home to time shift programs is perfectly legal. Cablevision is offering the same thing, but instead of the DVR being in your home, it's hosted in a Cablevision central location somewhere. However, pretty much everything else is the same.

Not so, say the TV networks and film studios, who claim that since the devices are on Cablevision's premises, now it's suddenly a copyright violation -- even if the person at home is the one pushing the button. It defies common sense to think that the identical action (clicking a button on a remote to record or watch an earlier recorded program) with an identical result (you can watch the program at your leisure) should differ in terms of its legality based on whether or not the box holding the content is in your living room or in Cablevision's warehouse. Yet, that's exactly how the studios and networks have read copyright law -- and a lower court originally agreed. The appeals court overturned the ruling, but even reading the decision, you get the feeling that they were twisting and turning to figure out a way to have copyright law actually make sense in this scenario.

The key question, which could impact numerous other innovative content services, concerns whether or not the "fleeting" copy that's made by Cablevision in the process of delivering the content to the end user is, in fact, an unauthorized copy. The appeals court said no (correctly from a common sense standpoint), but it had to tap dance around what the law and previous cases said to reach that decision. Not surprisingly, the networks and studios have appealed to the Supreme Court, and what happens next could be quite important in determining what's legal for plenty of other online services in the future.

While the Supreme Court has not yet decided whether or not it will hear the case, it has requested input from the Solicitor General on whether or not the SG believes that Cablevision is infringing on copyrights. When I read the LA Times piece, I wasn't sure which administration they meant, but Wired makes it clear it's the incoming one, and notes the conflict since the movie studios are represented by the same firm that Tom Perrelli came from. Perrelli, of course, is an Obama nominee for the justice department (and a former lawyer for the entertainment industry). Of course, it's not clear he'd have anything to do with the brief, as it would be for the Solicitor General -- and Obama has picked Harvard Law dean Elena Kagan, who among other things has been involved with Harvard's Berkman Center, and was instrumental in recruiting Larry Lessig back to Harvard from Stanford just a few months ago. Either way, while the case seems to focus on a fairly mundane aspect of copyright law, the eventual result could be quite important.

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Cablevision Remote DVR Doesn't Infringe; Decision Shows How New Tech Twists Copyright

from the copyright-law-is-a-mess dept

As TiVo and other DVRs became increasingly popular, various cable companies realized it probably made sense to offer similar features themselves. While some started selling home DVRs, a few realized that perhaps they could short-circuit around this by offering a remote, centrally-managed DVR instead. Time Warner was one of the first to announce such a project -- but almost immediately, the other half of Time Warner (the content guys) freaked out, and Time Warner's eventual offering was neutered of any really useful feature.

Basically, the various broadcasters are still freaked out about the idea of time shifting and commercial skipping -- even though both are perfectly legal. However, that won't stop them from doing whatever possible to stop such innovations from coming to market. So, two years ago, when Cablevision also decided to create its own remote DVR solution, various TV networks sued to stop it. Even though the actual offering was almost entirely identical to a perfectly legal TiVo, a district court ruled that Cablevision's remote DVR system infringed copyrights. This, by the way, highlighted how the entertainment industry lied when it insisted it would never use copyright law to stop a new consumer electronics offering from coming to market.

The good news, today, however, is that an appeals court has reversed the decision and sent it back to the lower court -- effectively pointing out that if using a DVR at home is legal, it's difficult to see how using a DVR that is based at your cable provider is any less legal. However, if you read the full ruling, you'll get a sense of just how ridiculous copyright law has become today, and how it is not at all equipped to handle modern technology:

As you read through that decision, you'll certainly see the points that Rasmus Fleischer highlighted earlier this year, when he pointed out how silly it was to distinguish between where something is stored, and whether it's accessed locally or remotely. However, copyright law is simply not set up at all to handle this simple fact, and tries to make silly distinctions between where copies are made, how stuff is transmitted and what counts as a performance and what doesn't. That leads to all sorts of twisted logic, which resulted in the initial ruling -- and the order overturning it and sending it back to the lower court (while the right decision) is equally twisted in spots. Basically, if there's anything to get out of this ruling, it's that copyright law is simply not equipped to handle the internet.

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